Why do we need spot colors? It’s because humans can see a wide range of colors—some say 10 million shades—but there’s a limit to what we can print in CMYK, the industry-standard combination of cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks. This is where spot colors – absolute colors generated by a specific ink – come in to fill the gaps.

CMYK has its limits
The diagram below represents the range of colors humans can see. You’ll notice that what we can see on a monitor, and what the CMYK offset printing process is capable of reproducing, is less than what spot colors (the “PANTONE gamut” in the diagram below) can achieve. Bright oranges and navy blues can be especially challenging.

Welcome back to Deke’s Techniques. This week, Deke shows how to convert an image from the RGB profile to CMYK—a process designers often need to go through when they’re sending their work to be printed commercially. However, Deke’s spin on this technique is an unconventional method that preserves more of your luminance data, using the Multichannel mode in Adobe Photoshop. Click the video below to start learning.

Photoshop doesn’t just support multiple color spaces, it supports infinite variations on the device-dependent ones. You can open an RGB photo, process it in Lab, and output it to CMYK, with certainty that the conversions will work.